White Oleander

13

FULL-ON SUMMER fell like a hammer. By nine in the morning you could already start dreading how hot it was going to be. Olivia took me for rides in the Corvette, up the 101 and then out one of the canyons, Topanga, Kanan Dume, to the beach, then we'd cruise back down the coast highway, the wind against our skins bared to the sun, ignoring the shouts of men from other cars. I'd never felt so beautiful and unafraid.

Sometimes she'd make up a pitcher of rum punch and play Brazilian music on the stereo — Milton Nascimento, Gilberto Gil, Jobim. Astrud Gilberto sang interestingly flat, like she was half asleep in a hammock, singing to a child. We sat in the living room on the striped cotton daybed, the fans turning slowly overhead, eating mangos with ham and looking at Olivia's pictures of Brazil. She pronounced the names of the cities in their hushing Portuguese: Rio de Janeiro, Itaparica, Recife, Ouro Preto, Salvador. Pictures of colonial cities painted popsicle colors, black women in white dresses sending candles out to sea. Pictures of Olivia at Carnival, wearing a dress of silver tinsel slit up to the armpits, her hair feathery and wild. She held a white man's hand, he was ta

"You'd love Carnival," she said. "You dance for three days straight."

"I hate crowds," I said, drunk on the rum punch she'd made, sweet and heavy as a brick. "I'm always afraid I'm going to be crushed."

"It happens," Olivia said, nodding to the samba music. "You better not fall down at Carnival."

After a while she got up to dance. I lay down and watched her in her head scarf and wrapped skirt, moving in time to the complex rhythms of the samba. I imagined her dressed only in tinsel and sweat, dancing with the throbbing crowd under the southern sun, the smells of rum and mangos and Ma Griffe. The music moved along her body in waves, her feet shuffling in small, hesitation steps, arms swaying like palms atop her raised elbows. Hundreds of thousands of people of every hue pulsing under the sun.

"Dance with me," she said.

"Can't dance," I said. "I'm a white girl."

"Don't say can't." She gri

I stood awkwardly before her, tried to copy her movements, but even slightly inebriated, I was aware of how ridiculous I was, how out of time with the music, how out of step. Her body moved in ten directions at once, all harmonized, supple as ribbon. She laughed, then covered her smile with her hand. "Feel the music, Astrid. Don't look at me. Close your eyes and be inside it."

I closed my eyes, and felt her hands on my hips, moving me. Each hip turned independently of the other. She let go, and I tried to keep the rhythm, letting my hips swing in big arcs to the complex beat. I lifted my arms and let the waves of motion travel along the length of me. I closed my eyes and imagined us in Brazil, on a beach with a palm-covered bar, dancing dangerously with men we would never see again.

"Oh Astrid, you've got to come to Carnival," Olivia said. "We'll tell your keeper your class is taking a trip to see the Liberty Bell, and steal you away. For three days in a row you don't sleep, you don't eat, you just dance. I promise, you'll never move like a white girl after Carnival."

When the songs turned quiet, she put her arm around my waist, danced with me close. Her perfume still smelled fresh, despite the heat and the sweat, like pine trees. I was as tall as Olivia now, and her holding me made me awkward, I was stepping on her feet.

"I'm the man," she said. "All you have to do is follow."

I could feel her leading me, her hand open on the small of my back, always dry, even in the heat.

"You're growing up so fast," she said softly in my ear as we danced like waves on Copacabana. "I'm so glad I found you now. In a year or two, it would have been different."

I imagined she was a man, dancing with me, whispering. "Different how?"

"Everything would have been decided," she said. "Now you're so open. You could go any number of ways." She danced me in slow circles, teaching my feet how to move, my hips to trace the sign of infinity.

THE WINDS of September fa

Coyotes drifted down into the city at night, driven by thirst. I saw them walking down the center line on Van Nuys Boulevard. The smoke and ash filled the basin like a gray bath. Ashes filtered into my dreams, I was the ash girl, born to these Santa Anas, born to char and aftermath.

At the height of the fires, 105 in the shade, I went back to school. The world burned and I started the tenth grade at Birmingham High. Boys blew me kisses in the halls, waved money at me. They heard I would do things. But I could hardly see them, they were just shapes in the smoke. Conrad, the chunky boy from the park, was in my typing class. He slipped me joints in the hall. He didn't ask me to suck him off now. He could see the flames in my hair, he knew my lips would scorch him. I liked the feeling. I felt like my mother in oleander time. Lovers who kill each other now will blame it on the wind.

I sent my mother pictures of Olivia, making gumbo, stirring the huge pot, dancing the samba with her pink palms and feet, driving with her Grace Kelly scarf tied around her head, how bright her skin looked against the white.

Dear Astrid,

I look at the fires that burn on the horizon and I only pray they come closer, immolate me. You have proved every bit as retarded as your school once claimed you were. You'll attach yourself to anyone who shows you the least bit of attention, won't you? I wash my hands of you. Do not remind me that it has been two years since I last lived in the world. Do you think I would forget how long it has been? How many days hours minutes I have sat looking at the walls of this cell, listening to women with a vocabulary of twenty-five words or less? And you send pictures of your Mulholland rides, your great good jnend. Spare me your enthusiasms. Are you trying to drive me mad?

DialM.

IN OCTOBER the leaves began to redden and fall, the black plums and cutleaf maples, the sweet gums. I came home from school, pla